Penalising Newly Optimised Terms

[Dougy]

I'm not sure whether this has been discussed recently, but i have noticed that search terms i have been optimising for over the past month appear to be dropping as opposed to gaining positions in the SERPs.
This could be considered normal as google may consider it as keyword over-optimisation, but terms that i havent optimised for a while now are still ranking in roughly the same positions.
Has anyone else seen this trend

[caveman]

Since before Florida. Over optimization, and it can be measured in degrees. ;-)

[keywordguru]

I would say that it must be judged on a site by site basis. I make changes on certain sites and watch the ranks change within days and have not experienced any drops for the changes. Yet I do make my choices and changes wisely.

I would think that you are probably tipping off the over-optimization flags as the previous posted said.

My advice, when you make changes, make them s-l-o-w-l-y and track to see what actually helps, and what hurts.
KG

[mark1615]

Overoptimization? What is it? This is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot but seems to have no specific definition. I will say though that we make changes slowly just to track the result. It is laborious, time-consuming, maddening, but ultimately better than anything than dumb luck and I can't seem to replicat dumb luck on a regular and predictable basis. ;)

[is300]

Dougy, unfortunatly, I had the exact same thing happen to me yesterday. I started another thread about this incident earlier today. I think it's still hanging around.

[Broadway]

I have pages that do great in the Google serps. I follow the SEO rules I read here on WW. I thought I knew what I was doing but in past weeks I did some optimization for some pages that I thought was straight foward and routine. I fully expected to see a slight improvement in the ranking of these pages, stat.

Instead I don't easily find these pages any more. I guess they're still in there just listed a lot lower. What I do see is where Google has selected other of my pages to kind of replace in the serps the pages I optimized. I assume I was penalized some how but can't figure out the specifics.

[Elixir]

Forget optimizing for Google leave you site alone and try to grow your busines by other means. You have to have thousands of rubbish links or be prepared to employ black hat techniques to make it in Google now.

[is300]

"Forget optimizing for Google"

If you work as an se optimizer for a living that is not an option.

[Elixir]

"IS". I do optimize for a living its our only income. There is something radically wrong with Google and my point although maybe not very clear is that most effort is wasted if you have a good quality site and follow the rules. Its best to concentrate on all other ways of directing traffic to your sites and sit it out until Google deals with some of the major issues that seem to be affecting their results right now. Any site where we have added some SEO to improve rankings has plummeted so we are leaving well enough alone until things even out a little. It is my belief that there is a new algorithim and just like Florida the victims are the sites following the rules. They are smart and a good SE I think it will come together. (Well I hope so or we are all out of business)

[hfwd]

I have sites that rank well on yahoo & beta msn, but they are no where on google since Florida. They have pretty much straight forward on-page seo, nothing black-hat.

I've sat back & watched one of them came back on page 3 in Google. It's been relatively stable there.

The dilemma is whether I should change the websites to make them rank better on Google, or whether just to let them be since they're doing ok on 2 other search engines.

Any thoughts?

[Elixir]

HFWD I would hold out for a bit. Google cannot keep us this crazy stuff for much longer or they will be history and you will have your site ranked well in Yahoo and MSN which will become more prominent. I really do believe that Google is seriously messed up and it will be get fixed. Please Google be nice its Christmas!

[is300]

I agree with the guy right above me. Google and it's shady algorithm are terrible. As soon as Beta MSN goes mainstream I'm going to encourage everyone within the top 300 ecommerce community to say the **** with google and start pushing MSN as the new engine to optimize for. With the founders of google selling off their 14+ million shares of stock I think we all know they'll be defunct in 3-4 years anyways.

Did you hear MSN and Yahoo are each forecasted to have 45% search engine market share by the end of 2005?

[sandalwood]

It's almost impossible(even if wants to) for Google to satisfy all of the SEO guys. Some will be smiling, some will be crying...
Living of SEO is a risk i think as algos are changing very often, and the SE game is getting harder.
If you have a well 'constructed' site with good content and some backlinks you can get good rankings in G, bMSN and all the rest.

[Hardwood Guy]

"start pushing MSN as the new engine to optimize for"

I haven't even tried, yet positions have been steadily improving recently with some good first page positions--yet MSN referrals are dropping?

[ownerrim]

"Did you hear MSN and Yahoo are each forecasted to have 45% search engine market share by the end of 2005?"

That is absolutely absurd. Where did you hear that?

[walkman]

a major problem with this:

those "directories" that scrap stuff from Google.
If you rank high in one update, your "links" with exact title will pop on up in hundreds of them.
If this isn't over optimization I don't know what is.